Bleak Prospects

(Reprinted from the issue of May 17, 2007)

The
announced Republican presidential candidates had their, er, debate,
on MSNBC, with Chris Matthews presiding like a sheepdog. No opening or
closing statements, just quick responses, with lots of barking.

In such a format, so
early in the race, it seems rather pointless to speak of winners and losers,
but Mitt Romneys team was understandably elated. Romney showed
impressive poise, fielding questions deftly and probably disarming many
viewers misgivings about his Mormon religion; as an old Michigander
who vividly remembers his maladroit father, Gov. George Romney, I could
hardly believe this was Georges son.

The old man, a
moderate Republican (remember them?), is still best known
for destroying his own presidential ambitions in 1968 with a single word: He
said hed been brainwashed by the military into
supporting the Vietnam War.

That episode
obviously taught Mitt a lesson he has never forgotten.

John McCain, on the
other hand, struck me as weary and worn out, a spent force. The days of the
Straight Talk Express are long gone. He has become an apologist for a lost
cause, and his recent foray into darkest Baghdad made him look absurd.
Stuck with a lot of positions that may once have seemed feisty, he now
excites more pity than enthusiasm.

The evenings
comedy was provided by Rudy Giuliani, who is also stuck with positions that
made him a winner in the Big Apple, but fail to grab Ma and Pa Kettle in the
heartland. Knowing this, he tripped all over his shoelaces trying to
clarify his views on abortion, which he now says he hates but
believes is a decision that each woman must be free to make for herself
though he would encourage her not to and he believes in federalism and would
appoint judges who might or might not reverse Roe v.
Wade because he is a strict constructionist. Or words (many, many
words) to that effect.

The pundits all had a
good belly laugh at his desperate wriggling, impassioned self-contradiction,
and garrulously transparent hypocrisy. He seemed to be wearing an invisible
bad toupee. Something tells me his campaign is headed downhill.

The candidate who did
acquit himself honorably was, as I expected, Ron Paul of Texas, the one real
conservative in the lot. He was also the only one who clearly opposed the Iraq
War and raised the subject of the U.S. Constitution. Paul had not come to
waffle. He had barely shown up in the pre-debate polls, but his small following
is ardent, and he did surprisingly well in the polls taken after the, er, debate.

Pauls
forthright presence was the only thing that made it a debate at all. The
others all invoked the sacred name of Reagan and avoided the name of Bush,
as if equally afraid of being identified with him and of being seen as
renegades to the GOP.

What the evening
showed was that George W. Bush has put his party in an extremely awkward
posture. In a way, even the abominable Giuliani merely reflects this fact:
Bush has sacrificed the post-Reagan anti-abortion party consensus to the
Iraq War, just when the whole country was finally coming around.

And if Giuliani should
somehow win the GOP presidential nomination next year, both major parties
will offer pro-abortion candidates, and Republican defections will ensure a
Democratic victory. Could the GOP even survive that?
The Darwinian Trap

The pundits also
enjoyed a hearty laugh when three of the Republicans said they didnt
believe in the theory of evolution. Darwinism is of course one of those things
Everybody Knows, except perhaps the aforementioned Ma and Pa Kettle.

As
is often the case, however, Everybody Knows this only in the
sense that few dare to question it, though few actually think about it. It is
really one of those received ideas that has been dinned into us until it has
come to seem self-evident, like the alleged superiority of democracy to all
other forms of government. How can it possibly be false?

But ask people
how they know it, and you quickly find that they simply accept it
on sheer faith. That disembodied god Science, the ultimate authority, has
spoken. The social pressure to assent to it is intense. Millions of
educated people cant even imagine doubting it. And
besides, who wants to be smirked at?

Yet Darwinism has
many intelligent critics, some of whom are scientists, and others who rely on
simple common sense. The latter include C.S. Lewis in his classic
Miracles: A Preliminary Study and Ann Coulter in her recent
best-seller, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

To these I would add
Darwinian Fairytales (just republished by Encounter) written by
the late Australian philosopher David Stove, himself an atheist who rejects
Darwinism as nonsense on its face that  never mind the fossil record
 cant withstand the most obvious tests of its cogency.

After all,
Darwins thesis of a ruthless struggle for
survival purports to be not a mere fact about the prehistoric past,
but a scientific law, a universal generalization, true always
and everywhere, as men, like all other species, compete for a limited supply
of food, and so forth.

Thus if it was ever
true, it was always true and always must and will be. So it must also be true
today. But is it? Obviously not. We are far more cooperative than
competitive in the horrifyingly ruthless way that Darwin says it is our very
nature to be. Every hospital, charity, and even family refutes the whole
batty idea.

According to his
theory, we should not only neglect our own children  with whom, after
all, we must compete for food  but eat them too! Darwinians have
tried to dodge these logical implications of the theory, and some have even
argued against charities and relief programs on grounds that they preserve
the unfit  which is exactly what they are supposed to
do. There is no reason, place, or explanation for mercy in this absurd view.

But such is the
hypnotic power of the false but clear idea. In that respect, Darwinism is like
Calvinism or Communism, but far more successful as a circular trap for the
modern mind.

This is a bold,
breathtaking, exhilarating book that daringly attacks its target in its very
stronghold, just where Everybody (or nearly Everybody) assumes it to be
safe, strong, and impregnable. In fact, Stove insists, the idea is
mad; and he never lets up. The result is a book that is not
only trenchant but often very, very funny.



In a nutshell,
Phil Donahues philosophy boils down to this: Mean old nuns
whacked my knuckles with a ruler, ergo God doesnt
exist.  Regime Change
Begins at Home, a new selection of my Confessions of a Reactionary
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